Playing Judo with Covid through Digital Transformation

Judo is a martial art that leverages the actions of your opponent to your advantage. It takes the opponents force and converts it into your own energy and action, neutralizing the opponent.

COVID is a formidable disease that has brought the world to its knees. Whole industries demand has dried up overnight due to this silent killer that can be easily spread under the wrong circumstances. It clearly is one of the most difficult opponents any of us have encountered in our lifetimes.

If we were to use the Judo analogy for taking the energy of an opponent to convert it into positive energy to progress the participants efforts forward, it may enlighten us around how to think about our stance in the face of this challenge.

In my recent discussions with a variety of consultants and recruiters, they are seeing two types of reactions during this time period by their senior clients. Some leadership teams are frozen and becoming tactical in the way they are responding. They’re unsure how to transform and so instead keep driving operational activity but aren’t strategically rethinking their business. In essence, they just keep absorbing the blows of the opponent to their own detriment.

At the same time, other leadership teams are using this time period to rethink their business model and approach through Digital transformation. A large part of this is that Digital is no longer an initiative but instead an imperative. It’s not just a technology nor just a channel but instead demands rethinking operations, organizational structure, technology and talent. These teams are capturing the power of the strike from COVID and using that energy to redefine their businesses to emerge even stronger on the other side of the virus.

So what does this mean to redefine or rethink your approach? You should be digging in with your customers to understand what drives them to consider, buy, service and continue their business with you. For each of those journeys, you should apply the lens of a world limiting face to face contact and moving large numbers of customer to engage online.  

This is actually an opportunity to leapfrog the typical Digital transformation process where you digitize out existing processes, but instead rethinking those processes end to end and cross channel for the simplest way to engage and achieve the intended outcomes. This should importantly consider when processes leak into one another – starting digitally and ending up on the phone or a retail or service center. Your customer is literally risking their health by engaging your company face to face – you should reflect the seriousness of this by ensuring all prior touch points digitally and the phone are captured and understood as your customer traverses across your company’s channels.

Why does this approach demand that organizations rethink operations, organizational structure, technology and talent? If you are truly to become a customer-centric organization that embraces the Digital channel, is your organization structured in a way that reflects that? Does the organization have the technology and data infrastructure critical to deliver on the promise? Do you have the right type of talent with a growth mindset and the experience and skills demanded to not only build out the new experiences, but more importantly to drive the organizational change that will be necessary? These are all critical questions senior leadership should be asking and answering during these challenging times.

That sounds like a lot to bite off, so how can an organization step into the process? I’d argue that you go after one of the journeys where you know that customers are engaging in great volumes and use it as a pilot. You are likely to impact more of them positively taking this more aggressive approach and reflect that you are there for them during these challenging times.

You should assess the variety of touch points, technologies, and processes that underly this volume rich journey and find the good / better / best solution that is likely to emerge across shorter to longer time periods. This will also likely begin to inform your broader strategic reframing of operations, organizational structure, technology and talent in trying to pull off this pilot. This should allow you to start to see possible pathways forward and where your gaps exist.

In a time of uncertainty, the more certainty that a customer can feel in engaging with you and your products, the better chance that you’ll elevate their brand during this time period. So which leadership team represents you today? Are you playing judo and converting the force of COVID into action and positive forward moving energy, or are you being frozen by it and just operationally reacting to it?